like my people, my
thoughts
poems
head
love
history
all are scattered.
and now that my matriarch is dead,
what
where
who
am i?
why did you leave me like this?
i don’t feel ready.
like my people, my
thoughts
poems
head
love
history
all are scattered.
and now that my matriarch is dead,
what
where
who
am i?
why did you leave me like this?
i don’t feel ready.
from now on, whenever a hebrew or yiddish word bubbles up into my heart, I will not allow myself to suppress it like I shamefully do my tears
I will let my lost languages, mame loshn, the tongues that put me in the skin of my ancestors, I will let those words burst out of my chest like fire
I will let them burn the skin of anyone who shames me for speaking a language i hold on to
languages too heavy for me to carry, the diaspora has made my arms weak but I will not let go.
i want to talk to g-d but loshn kodesh – the language that g-d speaks – hits my heart without passing through my ears.
i want to talk to my ancestors but mame loshn draws more laughs in this place than smiles of recognition.
i ache to speak the languages of my people, languages that taste like the desert and ghettoes, sand and glass, fire and resilience, but instead i speak common tongues like english and french and latin – i feel like crying because they are familiar in a way that my own languages may never be.
what does diasporic sorrow feel like?
it feels like my chest tightening with tears i’m not sure i’ll shed. my throat hurts, a lump is trying to escape from it.
it feels like my body tensing up in wait. i still don’t know what i’m waiting for.
it feels like a constant buzz of anxiety. like the kind i get when i don’t know if i’ve locked my front door, except there’s no home to go to at the end of the day to check.
it feels like the desert. hot. dry. my eyes sting like when sand gets in them.
it feels like confusion. like in the cartoons i used to watch, with a question mark flitting around my head. i can’t even express what i’m confused about, half the time.
it feels like the burst of sadness when i realize that the language my mother spoke to me as a child isn’t a made-up language after all. it’s the language of my people. it’s a language we all used to speak.
it feels like the frustration when my siblings and friends and i share pieces of our histories with each other, trying to make pieces of different puzzles fit together as one. none of us were born complete.
it feels like i am constantly justifying why i am, where i am, who i am, what i am. to the point where i question my own truth.
it feels like it will never get better. i will never know anything.
it feels like i will feel this way forever.
most of us always have, anyway.
passover (poem) [submission from hamletrash.tumblr.com]
remember when your skin first felt like a
disease, like every pore if you squeezed it
would spit cold cyanide
remember when you were a slave in the house of bondage
remember the blood on your thighs. remember
the plague of boils, the plague of blood,
the plague of cattle disease
(you used to have a toy a
cow with a button on its foot
push the button and its joints buckled
and collapsed)
pretending as you
scrubbed your sheets
that this was the blood of a man you’d killed
remember that spring when god peeled your skin off and ate it like bread
the terror of how your zipped coat
looked when you sat down
the waves and bubbles the zipper made.
like eve under trees
the sudden alien weight of her body
this is the bread of affliction
god spits blood in the river, god
whispers into your bed
kisses your neck full of boils
god in a breath of lice that squirm through
your firstborn’s hair
god bound between your eyes and
upon the doorposts of your houses
god’s blood in the nile
lamb’s blood on the door
cows’ blood in the fields
your blood in the sink
stick your smallest finger in the wine
my element is smoke.
dirty, captivating, floating, dissolving… choking.
my punishment is ephemerality, impermanence.
i am fascinated by the macabre
and also terrified.
my penance is letting go –
i self-sabotage and end up in purgatory.
there’s a smoke machine manned by spirits smoking cigarettes that smell unfamiliar – that one: a cigar.
my job, they say, is to clean the air by breathing:
it gives me anxiety and
the spirits shape-shift into various things they know unsettle me
so i name them Puck 6, Puck 2, Puck 5/
my least favourite small numbers.
when i get out of here, i will take up smoking again.
i will blow smoke in the face of everyone i see
and end up back where i came from –
unless i decide to change.
which i might.
In times of sorrow, take heart, even
though you stand at deaths door: the
candle flares up before it dies,
and wounded lions roar.
“diaspora poem?” [anonymous submission]
some nights when i’m alone, my thoughts run strange:
that my heart is a homeland,
pumping culture and language and identity
through rivers, over mountains.
nearer to my heart are the organs that are strong:
my lungs are my ancestors, receiving the most blood,
next my digestive system is my parents—
not as rich, yet not as poor as me—
because i am housed within my hands and feet.
i am choked by the circulation problems i’ve had since i was born,
and my hands and feet are cold and weak
like my sense of identity
like my connection with eretz yisrael
like my understanding of those other jews.
at which point can the dysfunctional body flourish,
when the heart is a homeland that cannot reach over distances,
when there are far more important places
for that blood to reach?
i want to reach out in the dark for answers,
but my feeble hands clutch at nothing
nothing but the drowning call of diaspora.
they say “remember where you came from” –
that’s hard to do when the only memories of your home are of broken glass and fire.
i call myself a diasporan
and i am…
but how do i explain that the places i come from
don’t exist anymore?
that the plurality of my heritage doesn’t equal home?
i say that i belong to the desert.
it’s the only answer that makes sense
because nothing really fits.
i love the sea, and the sea loves me.
i love the desert, but it doesn’t love me back.
i am afraid of open water…
maybe that’s my punishment for deserting the desert.
the thing with an open space like the sea and the desert
is that it can swallow you
it can consume you
it can confuse you.
home?
bayit?
beis?
where is that?
would u still make jokes if I told u that
for years,
I had nightmares of giant ovens,
showers that choked the life out of me,
lying down next to dirty, sickly, emaciated bodies, some dead, some barely alive, of people I once knew,
digging my own grave: one of millions,
science experiments performed on my body,
tell me:
why is any of this funny to u?
there are 2 kinds of love.
one: like the sun’s for the earth.
the other: like smoke’s for lungs.
you talk about me as if i created your sorrow:
as if i was not only the sun that put chlorophyll into your leaves,
but also the weeds that choked the life out of your rotting flowers.
i will sit and wait,
and hope that you notice i am only a small gust of wind.
in the meantime, i will try not to blow too hard on your petals.
i’m attracted to the kind of people that have seagulls flocking around their heads –
the storms brewing in their bodies tend to make my glasses fog up.
i have a meaningless name, void of story, without a destiny. i speak an empty language, one that does not speak to me. my country is not mine. my countrymen are not my people. they will forever see me as “other”, they let me know in small ways that i do not belong. there is a constant ache in my belly and it tastes like watery borsht and it smells like onions and it sparkles like silenced brown eyes that never die and it sounds like tentative whispers of old languages on thick clumsy tongues.
those whispers seem to tell me that i have no home, but i can’t be sure because i don’t speak the language.
i want to be smothered in jewishness.
i want to breathe it, i want jewishness in my skin.
when my hair stands on end i want it to exude jewishness,
i want to swallow jewishness when my throat is dry,
i want it to mix with the salt in my tears when i allow myself to cry
and stain my cheeks because i refuse to wipe them.
i want to feel all of it, all the things that come with existing in jewishness
i want to be able to breathe in and feel like my lungs aren’t half-deflated.
i want to suffocate in jewishness, and in suffocating, finally feel the sweet taste of air.
jewish history is not the holocaust
it is not the thousands of years of galus
of wandering exile, of remorse and disgrace.
it is not the inquisition, it is not the transition
from being golden kings of judah and yisrael to hidden scholars in babylon
from purveyors to seekers, from scholars to archaeologists.
it is not the story of revolts and submissions
of conversions and revelations,
of family secrets and underground bunkers.
jewish history is not the history of war
it is not the history of reclamation
it’s not the history of separation or desperation
and don’t you dare tell me it is a history in the middle of its final chapter.
“what do you have left then?” they ask, honest and curious
it’s a very good question. sometimes i don’t know.
(sometimes, though, when the light enters the sanctuary from the right angle
so early in the morning that my eyes are heavy and the words
modeh ani are thick on my lips, sometime i am filled
with the generations of people who have uttered these prayers before
who will say them again when i have returned to dust,
who will find in them old and new meaning, who will remember me
for the stories i passed down, for the blood i kept alive,
and i remember what my grandfather told me before he died:
jewish history is the promise of thousands of stars that was given to avraham.
everything else is a consequence.)
because of old country, Ts taste like Ss on my tongue.
i switch between “yid” and “yehudit”
when i am looking for a home.
learning languages only takes time
but my accent
my mouth will always betray me
english has enslaved me.